Day 74
Kellie pointed out to me today that I haven't told you where we are going next.
We left Cape Town 5 days ago and are in the middle of our 12 day Atlantic crossing. Our destination is Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Surprisingly it hasn’t been too weird to be completely surrounded by ocean and nothing else. Granted, we are only 5 days in and still have 7 to go. But it is going by really fast.
Today, instead of South Africa being the nearest land the tiny island of Tristan da Cahu took that honor. It is the worlds most remote inhabited island. It had a population of only 275 people that originated from 15 settlers. There are 80 families and only 8 surnames: Green, Glass, Hagan, Lavarello, Repetto, Rogers, and Swain. Nobody new is allowed to settle on the island. The land is all communally owned to the extent that if an outsider wanted to buy land they would have to change a law or the whole island would have to be put up for sale. How do you think their dynamic is? I bet there is so much drama.
Only three boats make nine trips a year from Cape Town. There is only one doctor and five nurses, although health care is free.
They finally received television in 2001. The only channel is the British Forces Broadcasting Service from the Falkland Islands.
I would not want to live there. Might be a nice place for a vacation though.
I also learned today that the birds we have been seeing following the ship are seabirds. They spend most of their time at sea, only heading to land to reproduce. Some birds may spend a year or two at sea, many of them never landing. They will literally fly for years, eat all the time, and never sleep. That is crazy! They never stop flying.
I learned this at A for Atlantic. It is a mini-series put on by my marine bio teacher every A day at 5:00. I finally remembered to go this time. He discussed the ocean under us right now, which is a gyre, and contains a lot of waste. Plastic waste, it is very broken down so it is hard to see, but it is there.
He also talked about deep sea creatures. There are a lot of them, most of them are fairly small but are ferocious and will latch onto prey and not let go because food is hard to find. They do a lot of their hunting from below, by seeing silhouettes against the little bit of light that shines down.
It was all very interesting. And we saw a whale! Actually three of them spouting just off the starboard side. They didn’t do anything besides that so we couldn’t tell what kind of whales they were. But how cool, we saw whales!
At night there was Disney Trivia. My team did not win. I clearly need to go watch The Sword in the Stone. I have never seen that movie and there were so many questions on it! Ugh. We did decently though. So did the team behind us, but only because they were cheating off of us. We were doing it white board style where you write your answers down on a white board and hold it us. Well, at the end I put down a random, made up name for one of the questions as a test, and they had the same answer. They were totally cheating off of us the whole time despite my efforts to keep our answers covered. So frustrating.
I was very proud of my answer to a question about Home on the Range. That movie is so obscure, and I got it right!
The final question required us to put in order a list of movies by release date. I almost had it, I put The Incredibles in the wrong place, I was so mad.
It was tons of fun though. If only they were questions about the Parks, I would have dominated.
Molly and I got a bunch more movies from Susan. Not that we need any more distractions from things. But watching things is our main form of entertainment. We should be set for weeks now.
Tomorrow I have a dress rehearsal for the talent show. Ahhh! I'm not ready. I am almost ready. I just need to learn how to dougie. I have that song in there but I can't do it very well. Can someone teach me how to dougie?
I'm so nervous! Ah!
